Writing by Hand: A Superior Revision Tool (A Master’s Thesis)

Nothing surpasses pen and paper as being “good to think with.” — Jack Goody

The seeds of this article were unknowingly sown toward the end of my time as an undergraduate between 1990 and 1994, when I was first exposed to the workshopping of papers (or what is now more commonly known as peer review). It was during these workshopping sessions that I formed the opinion that student writing — the writing of my peers — wasn’t very good. By this I mean that it was often full of awkward constructions, had no smoothness or flow, contained jumps in thought and logic that left me confused, and rambled on and on without saying much of anything. Stated more simply, it was difficult to read and rarely made a clear academic argument. Though my writing wasn’t perfect, it was far better than that of my peers. Why was this? I wondered. Shouldn’t we all be better writers now than when we were in Core Composition I and II? Shouldn’t we all be striving to become more accomplished writers in order to excel academically while in school and in our chosen career fields after school? Unable to find answers to these questions, I left school believing that because I was an English major with a strong interest in writing I was probably putting more effort into trying to improve my writing that most of my peers. While I was correct in this assumption, the differences in the ways we composed were also responsible for the differences in the quality of our writing; that writing my initial drafts by hand and the recopying that goes along with it were the differences that made my writing better by engendering revision would not be clear to me until years later.

Writing by Hand and Recopying As Revision

During the years that initially followed my undergraduate work, I took all I was taught in my English classes at school and learned how to write. Driven to become a complete, self-sufficient writer, I wrote a great deal and saw work published. I wrote my initial drafts by hand because that was the only way I had ever written anything. Although I knew how to type, writing or composing on the keyboard was never a consideration; it simply never entered my mind. The more I wrote, the more I began to recognize the power that came from wielding a pen and working on paper; there was something about it that seemed to promote introspection. Writing by hand was like having an intimate conversation with myself, which allowed me to think more clearly and capture my thoughts more readily. But part of my development also involved the word processor. Throughout my time as an undergraduate, I used WordPerfect 5.1 at home and at school, as did most everyone at the time. I composed my papers by hand then typed them into the word processor, where I made only a few changes before printing them. I didn’t do more with the word processor because I didn’t think I needed to; I was satisfied with what I’d written and printed what I felt was a well-written final draft. But after school, as I gradually became a more proficient writer, I in turn became more proficient with the word processor.

I soon knew WordPerfect and, later, Microsoft’s Word inside and out and fell in love with the power of the tools; it was a power, though, that came less from knowing how to use the word processor than from knowing how to write. It wasn’t that the word processor could save a document that so impressed me. It was, instead, that I could easily print an existing document over and over and revise extensively or simply move commas and semicolons around; I could continue working on a piece of writing indefinitely, gradually moving it toward perfection each time I touched it. The word processor didn’t do this for me; it simply allowed me to make the revisions and changes that I, as a developing writer, now recognized should be made. In other words, only after I was able to recognize and remove the “dissonance” from my writing — the awkwardness, incongruity, and inconsistency — was I able to recognize and utilize the word processor’s ability to facilitate revision (Sommers 82). My writing abilities and facility with the word processor gave me a tremendous feeling of power; I believed that my command of pen and paper and machine would allow me to accomplish great things with my writing. I became convinced that this was how superior written work was created and that other writers worked just as I did — composing initial drafts and revising subsequent printed drafts by hand, then using the word processor to produce truly-finished, high-quality end products.

In the years that followed, I continued to improve my writing by writing (writing my drafts by hand before heading to the word processor). And, as a result, I continued to see work published in a variety of newspapers and periodicals and had an essay appear in a textbook about writing. When I made it back to graduate school in early 2008, then, I was an accomplished, empowered writer who felt reasonably sure that he could hold his own with his graduate peers. I quickly discovered, however, much to my dismay, that the writing of my graduate classmates was often not very good, maybe not even as good as the writing of my undergraduate classmates from years before. I was shocked. I assumed that students in graduate English programs would be above-average if not excellent writers; yet here I was again, nearly 15 years later, reading too many papers that were often difficult to read and failed to make coherent arguments. Why was this? I again asked myself. These were intelligent, committed students; so why, then, was their academic writing far too often of inferior quality? There had to be a reason, an explanation.

Two things then happened during the fall of 2008 that helped bring together everything I had been pondering for so long. First, in a core composition class I was teaching as a graduate assistant, most of my students handwrote a first assignment — a one-page summary — that they should have typed. We had discussed the syllabus on the first day of class, which included talk about how all written work has to be typed, yet the majority of my students still wrote their summaries with pen or pencil on paper. Even though these handwritten summaries met the other requirements of the assignment and were good — equal to or better than most of the work that was typed — I was, at first, more than a bit frustrated. Why can’t students follow simple instructions? I sighed in exasperation. Then the question struck me: Why so many? Why had so many students submitted handwritten papers rather than typed papers? Two or three would have been understandable, but 15 or 16? Something significant here was begging to be noticed. Finally, I hit upon what I believed to be the explanation: While all of my students — most of whom were young, just three months removed from high school — undoubtedly owned computers (desktops or laptops), few probably owned or had easy access to printers. Knowing they had an assignment due, but not wanting to trouble themselves with typing and then finding a way to print such a small, seemingly-unimportant assignment, they took the quick way out and created “hard copies” by handwriting their summaries. They probably didn’t do this because they enjoyed writing by hand; they most likely did it because it was easier than typing and without a printer they had no other choice. Yet by working without the word processor and writing by hand, they unknowingly and unintentionally produced work that was equal to or better than most of the work that was typed. Once again I stood face to face with my long-held belief that writing by hand produced superior written products. And once again I did not know exactly why.

The second thing that occurred took place in my Rhetoric and the Teaching of Writing course. During a fascinating small group exercise in which we shared our individual writing processes with one another, one of my classmates mentioned that she had been up all night writing an essay for another class because she had forgotten to take her laptop with her on a trip out of town. Believing that an essay written in such haste couldn’t possibly possess much quality, I asked the obvious question: “Why didn’t you use pen and paper and write it by hand while away from home?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to write it twice.”

“That’s how I write,” I replied. “I write my first draft by hand, then type it into Word and continue writing and revising from there.”

“Really? That’s weird.”

It was then, finally, that the pieces to the puzzle I was trying to solve began coming together: Many students do not write by hand because they don’t want to recopy their handwritten drafts; instead, they type their work directly into the word processor, after which they probably don’t revise much since even the simple act of recopying is seen as a chore or extra step. This was probably the case with many of my graduate classmates and could have been the case with my undergraduate classmates as far back as 1994. Interesting, however, is that students like myself who write by hand and then recopy their drafts into the word processor quite often produce better written products than those who shun handwritten drafts. Why was this? I wondered. I then thought of Peter Kratzke, a composition instructor who advocates recopying as a way to revise. Suddenly, it all began to make sense: Students who write by hand and then recopy their drafts (by hand or on the keyboard) are revising while in the act of recopying, thus producing better written products than those who compose on the word processor. The rereading that is essential to recopying begets reevaluation of one’s work, which itself is revision. I now understood why better ways of constructing my prose often come to mind when I’m writing or typing from handwritten drafts: rather than simply rereading and recopying what I’ve placed on the page, I’m back inside my writing, rethinking and rewriting what I’ve already written or, in a word, revising. Kratzke puts it this way: “[R]ecopying, properly done, is nothing short of an existential literacy during which we are aware of our own thinking even while we think about something” (17). Those who are not writing drafts by hand in order to avoid recopying, then, are foregoing a crucial prose-shaping revision opportunity.

But then the work of my students again came to mind. Why were their handwritten summaries so good without being subjected to the revision that emanates from recopying? Thinking again about the idea of recopying as revision, it struck me that writing by hand is itself revision — a cognitive process that is naturally present when composing by hand, one that much like Kratzke’s “existential literacy” takes place unconsciously while we’re in the act of deliberating over what to say and how best to say it. My students, then, had revised their work on their own without knowing it, shaping and improving their summaries as they composed. And if they had recopied these handwritten drafts in order to print hard copies, their work would have been better yet, having undergone an additional stage of revision.

With handwriting’s special quality now explained and confirmed to my satisfaction and revealed as revision, I became utterly convinced that handwriting — the writing of initial drafts and the revising of subsequent printed drafts by hand — should be restored to the composition curriculum or given the renewed attention it rightfully deserves where it has lost favor within the curriculum. Writing by hand is, above all else, a superior revision tool. But it is a superior revision tool because it is first a powerful learning tool: the very tool by which we acquire our intellectual powers is the same tool that then allows us to use those powers — to think, compose, and revise effectively. Composition instructor Maxine Hairston says that “writing is a way of learning and developing as well as a communication skill,” while writer Meredith Sue Willis says: “Revision is a form of learning; it pushes us farther into experience, which alters how we see the past and prepares us for the future” (124; qtd. in Smede 118). Therefore, before I look at how handwriting engenders revision and solves many, if not all, of our revision-related problems, I’ll first present a brief defense of handwriting and then talk about how it is a key part of learning throughout the lives of students.

A Defense of Handwriting

Because the subject of elevating the standing of handwriting within the composition curriculum wouldn’t even be at issue without the existence of the computer and word processor, it’s important to begin by stating that this article is not a criticism of technology. It’s possible, however, that it could be seen as such since defending handwriting by countering the claims of its pro-technology detractors or making note of technology’s shortcomings is itself often and incorrectly seen as criticism. But if there is any sort of subtle criticism present, it is only that students don’t use the word processor to their advantage. In the move away from writing by hand and toward composing on the computer keyboard, we’ve gradually lost sight of the word processor’s true function — the facilitation of revision — and therefore too often watch students use it as little more than a “fancy typewriter.” But when we encourage students to write their initial drafts by hand and then recopy, we restore revision to the writing process. If students then do nothing more with the word processor than use it to type and print their written products, their work will be the better for having seen at least two levels of revision: the revision that occurs cognitively when composing by hand and the revision that emanates from recopying.

Nonetheless, talk of restoring handwriting to its proper place within the composition curriculum — much less emphasizing that it’s a superior revision tool — continues to rile many devoted adherents of the computer and word processor, provoking a defensiveness that’s hard to understand. This defensiveness often manifests itself in exaggerated and unsupported claims meant to undermine handwriting and thus elevate the stature of the computer and word processor; such claims or biases against handwriting are seen in everything from scholarly articles and books on writing to academic studies that compare handwritten and word processed essays. For example, unsupported assertions are frequently made that writing by hand is laborious, arduous, and slow. Milton Teichman and Marilyn Poris, in “Initial Effects of Word Processing on Writing,” intimate that handwriting is the reason some students “find writing an uncomfortable, punishing, and even fearful experience” and then link these experiences to “past associations of tedium and frustration” (94). In “A Synthesis of Studies on Computer Supported Composition, Revision, and Quality,” Barbara Erickson speaks of the “drudgery of revising and editing” and “tedious recopying,” while Bill Dunn and David Reay, in their “Word Processing and the Keyboard,” talk about the “mechanical burdens of writing” (239). Similarly, author Dennis Baron, in A Better Pencil, attempts to portray writing by hand as everything it’s not by associating it with “writing between the lines,” “messy crossing out,” “messy erasures,” “literal cuts and pastes,” and “spilled or lumpy Wite-Out” (221, 222). He also states that handwriting is an “insurmountable aesthetic stumbling block for some writers” (Gilbert). One can’t help but feel the uneasiness possessed by these scholars and writers, the palpable fear or belief that if they can’t completely discredit handwriting their technology might be taken from them.

Authors of studies that compare handwritten and word processed essays possess this same sort of defensiveness and bias against handwriting, although in their case it’s often motivated by a profound disappointment in their inability to acquire the hard data by which to validate their hypotheses. In “Effects on Essay Scores of Intermingling Handwritten and Word-Processed Essays,” for instance, Donald Powers et al. found that handwritten essays received higher scores than word processed essays. Disappointed with their findings, they reworked and repeated their study yet still reported the same results. Their explanation, however, was not that handwritten essays might actually be better written products, but rather that readers were either more lenient when scoring the handwritten essays, more inclined to give them the “benefit of the doubt,” or that because several handwritten essays carried evidence of revision (erasures and strikeouts), readers rewarded these efforts with higher scores (230, 226). Interestingly, messy erasures and cross-outs are seen here as giving the handwritten essays an unfair advantage; handwriting can’t seem to win for losing. Again, one can almost feel the researchers’ sense of desperation, their fear that if their studies do not at least appear to yield the desired results they might be found unworthy and their computers and word processors taken away.

How does one defend handwriting against such specious assertions and statements without looking silly or being painted as a neo-Luddite? It’s difficult, to be sure, other than to say that the only laborious thing about handwriting is the deep thinking and contemplation it engenders, which is exactly what makes it a superior revision tool. Perhaps the only dangerous or damaging aspect of handwriting is the risk one runs of acquiring a tired arm, writer’s cramp, or a writer’s bump (which might, however, be carried as a badge of honor by some). Any one of these pale in comparison, however, to the “rampant carpal tunnel syndrome that . . . keyboard enthusiasts [don’t] talk much about” and the general unhealthiness of regularly sitting at a keyboard for extended periods: a 2007 study of Australian teens concluded that “computer use was associated with changes in adolescent habitual postures. . . . In males, increased computer use was associated with increased head flexion and neck flexion. In females, increased computer use was associated with increased lumbar lordosis [abnormal forward curvature of the spine]” (Florey 185; Straker 642, 634). Such findings are no doubt the reason that some tutorials for online courses now make it a point to encourage students to “stay healthy” by standing, stretching, and moving around from time to time when working on the computer. Needless to say, no such warning is necessary for handwriters — those using pens, pencils and paper.

No one, of course, is suggesting that we rid the world of word processors, least of all me. But I am advocating that we return handwriting to its proper position within the composition curriculum — placing it at least a notch or two above the word processor and word processing. Kitty Burns Florey asks, “Why can’t the keyboard and pen lie down together like the lion and the lamb and live in harmony?” (186). I ask the same question, believing that they can because both have value, both are needed, and both complement the other. Baron points out that the digital revolution, like all communication revolutions, isn’t quite playing out as planned; the computer has not lived up to the grandiose promises of its adherents, yet we’ve adopted and adapted it to our writing needs (xvii). “But no revolution brings the millennium nor a guarantee of salvation,” says Hairston, “so it is important for us to preserve the best parts of earlier methods for teaching writing. . .” (125). Handwriting is the best part of an earlier method, one that bridges technology’s gaps and helps the computer and word processor live up to at least some of its grand guarantees. Deborah Brandt says that “new literacy practices pile up on top of old ones and nothing ever quite goes away” (xi). And even Baron concedes that “for many of today’s writers, digital technologies exist alongside older pencil and paper varieties” (49).

Nevertheless, the defensiveness of technology’s supporters and their bias against handwriting prompt many to forecast the imminent demise of handwriting. Their predictions should be taken with a grain of salt, however, for they are largely the products of wishful thinking. “[T]ools like computers come to be regarded as an indispensable part of progress,” says MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. “But in truth, we consistently choose routes of invention that depend on our machines; we then ignore, and soon forget about, non-technical answers to the same challenges that might be just as effective, if not more so” (qtd. in Oppenheimer 101). Though not yet forgotten, handwriting functions in just this way, remedying the shortcomings of the computer and word processor by applying seemingly novel, non-technical solutions to technology’s inadequacies: while the word processor can do many things — just ask anyone who not that long ago was calculating the space needed for a footnote at the bottom of a term paper or using carbon paper to make copies — neither it nor the computer can “teach novice writers how to think, plan, or revise [or] transform inexperienced writers into proficient writers” (Ferris 345). Yet writing by hand, as we have suggested and will discuss further, can and does do all of these things especially well. Kratzke, when talking about how the lasting applications of technology are usually its secondary ones, says that it should come as no surprise when what was once thought of as “futuristic” becomes today’s “haunting disappointment”: supersonic air travel, for example, never proved commercially viable, while traditional aircraft continues to be the means by which people move about countries, crisscross continents, and traverse the globe (11). I say, then, in a similar turn, that it should come as no surprise when a seemingly-antiquated, non-technical tool such as handwriting “resurfaces” to address technology’s inadequacies and supply writers with a superior revision tool.

Handwriting: A Powerful Learning Tool

Thinking along the same lines as Weizenbaum, philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once said: “The best education is to be found in gaining the utmost information from the simplest apparatus” (or the “simplest apparatus capable of doing the job,” adds Bob Albrecht, a longtime proponent of scholastic approaches to BASIC) (qtd. in Oppenheimer 345). What, then, could be a better example of the “simple approach to the complex art of learning” than handwriting? (345). While it’s been known for decades that handwriting is a fundamental building block of learning, a recent study has shown that it’s a key part of learning for children and adults throughout their lives (Kelley). For starters, it helps children (and adults) learn how to spell and, by association, read. “[H]andwriting is not an isolated skill,” says Florey.

“For young students, the primary goal is to learn to read fluently — as [Dennis] Williams puts it, “to crack the code of the alphabet” — and, as they write their letters, they’re matching symbols to sounds. They not only see the letters and hear the way they sound, they actually create them, on paper, with care. In addition, they are able to get a clear idea of which letters are commonly associated with each other — a necessity for good spelling.” (155)

Writing in 1921, Walter Dill Scott, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, said that in learning to spell:

“[C]hildren in school . . . saw the word printed in their books; they did more or less writing, and then felt the movements of their hands and arms as they wrote; they were called upon to spell the word in class orally, and so heard how it sounded. They thus had three “cues” for the word — they saw it, they felt it, and they heard it. [T]hey had all of these three cues to assist them in remembering how it was spelled, i.e., to assist them in forming an image of it.” (67)

Though Scott seems to dismiss speaking — the actual utterance of the word — as an important fourth cue, his point is clear: While we can see, hear, and speak words, writing by hand is the only way we can touch and feel them, shape and mold them. Writing by hand immerses us in language, which allows us to explore, experiment, get ourselves dirty, and make a mess of things in order to learn the intimacies of language.

In her 2007 Newsweek article, “The Writing on the Wall,” Raina Kelley reports that the significant decline in the quality of students’ handwriting appears directly related to the increase in the frequency of problems such as letter reversals. Similarly, Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting Without Tears, says that “when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All these subjects would be much easier for these kids to learn if handwriting was an automatic process” (qtd. in Kelley). Learning disabilities specialist Louise Spear-Swerling believes that handwriting instruction is extremely important, “not merely to learning-disabled kids but to all children at the early stage when they’re trying to master letter sounds” (Florey 155). “Writing focuses their attention,” says Spear-Swerling. “Just looking at a letter isn’t going to do it” (qtd. in Florey 155).

It should not surprise, then, that handwriting also fosters improved academic achievement. “There’s an increasing body of evidence that says good handwriting can influence academic performance on many levels,” says Florey (154). A 2007 study by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham found that a majority of teachers “believe that students with fluent handwriting produced written assignments that were superior in quantity and quality and resulted in higher grades. . .” (Kelley). But equally as important is the finding that handwriting is essential for a “skill that students will need [throughout] life, note-taking” (Kelley). “It would be hard to find an educator who disagrees with the idea that . . . those who know how to take fast, readable notes in lectures get higher scores on tests than those who don’t,” says Florey (160). With this in mind, Georgetown University law professor David Cole banned laptops from his classroom in 2007. Says Cole:

“Note-taking on a laptop encourages verbatim transcription. The note-taker tends to go into stenographic mode and no longer processes information in a way that is conducive to the give and take of classroom discussion. Because taking notes the old-fashioned way, by hand, is so much slower, one actually has to listen, think and prioritize the most important themes.”

Seventy percent of his students like the no-laptop policy, Cole reports, while 80 percent say they are “more engaged in class discussion when they are laptop free.”

This academic success often translates into success in the workplace. Even in our present high-tech work environment, people are still judged by their ability to quickly and routinely compose concise, coherent notes, memos, and instructions in an easily readable script. And with cacography-related business losses reported at $200 million annually, employees who are proficient writers with neat, legible handwriting are actively sought after in numerous professions (Florey 159). “In businesses that continue to require handwritten applications,” writes Florey, “it’s a truism that job candidates with a pleasing script tend to be hired over those who scribble” (158). Florey, in fact, says she recently experienced this firsthand when sorting through handwritten applications for several writing positions: “I found myself drawn to those with legible handwriting and prejudiced against the scrawlers; in every case, the better handwriters turned out to be better writers as well” (158–59).

Writing by hand also taps into our artistic side, even fostering creativity; we all want to scribble and draw, it seems. “The teaching of proper handwriting evokes children’s innate sense of visual order and beauty. It gives children and eye for good design [and] the opportunity for artistic self-expression,” writes Wolf Von Eckardt. “[Y]oung children want to learn to write,” Florey says, “They see it as a natural, desirable, inevitable process. They begin drawing as soon as their small-motor skills permit them to hold a pencil or a paintbrush, and they instinctively scribble letter-like forms: they see their elders writing and want to imitate them” (157). For many children, drawing is a major step in the prewriting phase. Michael, the subject of a young-writers case study, “needed to draw before he was able to write in the composing phase. . . . As soon as Michael completed his drawing, he started to write about information contained in the picture. At this juncture he began the composing phase” (Graves 27). Ron Fortune, in “Visual and Verbal Thinking,” notes that while some studies have asserted the importance of visual thinking in the composing of children, little information is available on the role of drawing in the composing processes of older writers (152). Considering that something like the formal outline, for example, has given way to informal notes (detailed or not) that function more as a map or drawing that directs or guides writers through their texts, it seems reasonable to conclude that visual thinking and the inclination to draw are present in the composing processes of writers of all ages.

Since the coming of the word processor and desktop publishing, concern with the overall aesthetics of our finished documents has become another aspect of how we write. Florey says that “Gestalt [or holistic] graphologists take into account not only individual letter strokes but how they connect (or fail to), how they are placed on the page, how they seem to flow — the overall ‘look’ of the handwriting sample” (103). While in the act of composing, we’re often keenly aware of how we want our printed pages to appear (headings, subheadings, fonts, colors, margins, etc.); handwriting not only plays a role in fostering and nurturing this kind of visual order and creativity, but also lends itself quite naturally to the drawing, mapping, and sketching inclinations inherent in our cognitive makeup.

Handwriting is itself drawing, of course, but it’s also much more. Handwriting involves the manipulation of real objects — grasping pens or pencils and pushing and pulling them across paper — which is also essential to learning. Todd Oppenheimer says that learners need hands-on experiences,

“meaning the opportunity to manipulate real objects, such as beans or colored blocks. The value of these materials, child-development experts believe, is that they deeply imprint knowledge into a young child’s brain, by transmitting the lessons of experience through a variety of sensory pathways. . . . The overall picture suggests that the sensory capacities of the human hand send powerful signals to the brain, helping it learn and develop.” (198–99).

“[V]isual stimulation is probably not the main access route to nonverbal reasoning,” says educational psychologist Jane Healy. “Body movements, the ability to touch, feel, manipulate, and build sensory awareness of relationships in the physical world, are its main foundations” (qtd. in Oppenheimer 198). “When people [use] computers the way they do now, it’s all visual, with a little bit of auditory activity,” says Susan Lederman, a professor of psychology and computing and information science. “If you use them a lot, you are cutting off the natural kind of interaction with the world that you get with the hand. The hand and eye complement each other” (qtd. in Oppenheimer 199–200). Visual and auditory stimulation alone are obviously not adequate for well-rounded learning, as Scott knew quite well nearly 90 years ago when advocating handwriting as one of three cues or processes that helped students learn and remember how to spell (67). And Janet Emig, in her “Hand, Eye, Brain: Some ‘Basics’ in the Writing Process” from 1978, said: “Research into perception has made it quite clear that, in part, we see and hear, as we move our hands, with our brain” (111). Seeing and hearing are clearly not doing, but writing by hand most definitely is. Kratzke, in “Recopying to Revise,” says, “Our heuristic goal, after all, is to move from . . . ‘telling’ to empowering students with a systemic understanding about ‘doing’” (18–19).

What we’re talking about here, of course, is kinesthetic experience — the sensations student writers and learners experience through physical activity, through the movement of the muscles throughout their bodies. In his pioneering work on the technology of television, Jerry Mander looks at how the lack of physical activity and eye movement decreases brain activity. When humans are not moving their eyes, says Mander, when they are not actively “seeking images,” their brains drift toward “alpha,” a noncognitive, passive-receptive mode (Absence 77). “This lack of seeking images disrupts the normal association between eye movement and thought stimulation. . . . [W]hen an image doesn’t have to be sought, an important form of mental stimulation is absent” (80). In the same way that “gathering data from print is an active, not passive, process,” so too is writing by hand an active process — one that not only has us moving our hand and eyes to create images, but one that also has us continually seeking images as we read, reread, revise, and recopy (82).

An example of the way in which the value of kinesthetic experience is overlooked is Vincent Connelly, Deborah Gee, and Elinor Walsh’s “A Comparison of Keyboarded and Handwritten Compositions and the Relationship with Transcription Speed,” a UK study of handwriting and keyboarding fluency in primary school children. Connelly et al. state: “Keyboarding requires the writer to find and select the appropriate keys to produce a letter. Therefore, it is simpler than handwriting where letters are required to be formed by hand and so motor processes are easier for keyboarding” (482). While this statement, for an instant, may seem plausible, the focus on easing or lessening the developing motor skills that move children to hold a pencil and draw and scribble as soon as they are able is the antithesis of the best way to learn. If it is indeed more difficult to dot an ‘i’ and cross a ‘t’ than to execute a keystroke (and no evidence is offered by Connelly et al. to support this claim), then handwriters benefit immeasurably from the effort: the hand and eye move together to increase brain activity while the kinesthetic experience of writing by hand helps the brain to learn, develop, and remember.

Rebecca West, in Writers at Work, echoes Healy, Lederman, Emig, and others when saying that she writes by hand when “anything important has to be written. I think your hand concentrates for you. . . . My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and can write with it and I can play with it” (qtd. in Plimpton 24, 23). West, by her own admission, remembers better when her entire body is involved in the writing process; hence the term “kinesthetic memory”: when hand, eye, and brain are all focused on the same task, they work together and independently to create sensations and associations within the mind and body. These sensations and associations not only create memory, but also serve to recall and evoke memory. “The act of writing,” says Daniel Chandler, “fuses physical and intellectual processes.”

Handwriting is important for yet another reason. “[R]esearch shows that when children are taught how to do it [write by hand], they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves” (Kelley). Florey says that by continually changing her handwriting throughout adolescence and into early adulthood, she was really only trying to express herself and find her self (19). “[T]he literal act of writing may be for some of us an aesthetically necessary part of the process,” writes Emig.

“We may be able to make personal statements initially or steadily only in our own personalized script, with all of its individualities, even idiosyncrasies. To employ the impersonal and uniform font of the typewriter [or computer] may for some of us belie the personal nature of our first formulations. Our own language must first appear in our own script.” (112)

Writing by hand also involves something very personal that goes far beyond the unique markings that one leaves upon the page: an encounter with the self. Writing by hand is an internal form of expression that allows a writer to discover, get to know, and then become comfortable with one’s self through intimate conversation. Michel Foucault, though not talking specifically about handwriting, once commented, “I believe that . . . someone who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books, but that his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books. . . . The work includes the whole life as well as the text” (qtd. in Loughery 329). Handwriting is a holistic relationship with the self — a relationship that takes place largely within the writer’s head, of course, but one that also takes place in the physical world through the act of writing and the writer’s awareness of what he or she is doing and trying to achieve over time.

Because learning remains a relatively linear process, as so many educational experts attest, it’s easy to see why handwriting plays such an essential, all-important role in learning (Oppenheimer 344). For while writing is indeed a recursive process, the “literal act of writing, with its linear organization in most Western systems, may reinforce in some way the work of the left hemisphere of the brain, also linear in nature” (Emig 112). Stated another way, “because of the innate predisposition of the left hemisphere to proceed linearly, most written language is invariably linear in form as visible analogue of the brain’s workings” (112). Thus, when we push handwriting into the darkest corners of the composition curriculum or discard it altogether (or “celebrate the computer’s ability to break up the old, constricting, linear forms of information”), we handicap student writers by taking away a fundamental building block of learning, the primary tool by which they, among other things, learn to create, think visually, manipulate language, and succeed in all areas of academics (Oppenheimer 344). Recognizing all this, the College Board, in 2005, “added a handwritten essay to the SAT [in] an effort to reverse the de-emphasis on handwriting and composition that may be adversely affecting children’s learning all the way through high school and beyond” (Kelley). In light of all this research, says Kelley, educators are trying to wedge handwriting back into the curriculum.

This discussion of handwriting as an all-important building block of learning and the profound education it provides brings to mind “The Feeling of Power,” an Isaac Asimov short story that describes a future time when humans are wholly dependent upon computers. Myron Aub, an unskilled laborer whose job it is to maintain the great Multivac computer, comes up with the idea of “computing without a computer”; he copies the numbers from his computer screen and then, solely for his own enjoyment, learns how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide the numbers with his head and hand on a piece of paper (73). But when a programmer learns of Aub’s hobby and then has him demonstrate his talent before an amazed committee, the silly idea of computing without a computer is suddenly seen as a “method for going beyond the computer, leapfrogging it, passing through it” (73). “Graphitics,” as this computing by hand is called, eventually spreads far and wide, filling people with a tremendous feeling of power as they compute and calculate with their own faculties (75). Now liberated from the computer, they envision a world of limitless possibilities.

Writing by hand, quite similarly, is computing without a computer. Handwriting is the tool with which we can go beyond, leapfrog, and pass through the word processor (as did my students when writing their summaries), the simple apparatus that engenders the deep thinking and contemplation that allows us to compose and revise so effectively with our own faculties. Kratzke says that recopying gives students the “‘inside edge’ in mastering the machine” (19). Writing by hand, then, in a similar fashion, allows students to claim an independence from the word processor, which itself is a form of mastery; when students know that they can work without the word processor, and that doing so can often improve their writing, they are liberated and empowered, thus opening the way to infinite possibilities. Kurt Vonnegut, when speaking of such possibilities, said, “[I]t’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do” (qtd. in Kratzke 16). No longer held in check by the word processor, students empowered by handwriting have an opportunity to produce work that is truly the product of themselves. But owning an independence from the word processor does not mean forsaking the machine. It simply means that student writers, properly so, are technology’s masters; they decide when to employ the word processor and how to use it to their best advantage. “[B]y disempowering (but not unplugging) computers,” writes Kratzke, “we are ultimately empowered” (17).

Thomas Kuhn once said: “Novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong” (qtd. in Hairston 120). And so it is, then, that writing by hand, that simple non-technical novelty that allows us to compute without a computer, is not only an indispensible building block of learning but also a superior revision tool — a tool or non-technology that, more precisely, allows student writers to produce better written products by solving many of our revision-related problems, most of which have been inadvertently caused by the computer and word processor.

Revision and Composing on the Word Processor

A common observation made by many composition instructors (much like my observation of the writing of my classmates) is that student writing is often not very good. “[M]uch student writing lacks a certain human quality,” says Kratzke. “It is as if papers are written by robots, not students aiming, in the familiar phrase, ‘to join in the conversation’” (15). Stanford University professor Clifford Nass says that today’s students don’t write essays, they write in paragraphs. Students today are less able to take a big idea and see it through; their papers are more like snippets and collected ideas (Digital). The reason most often given for this substandard writing is revision — or the lack thereof. Students, it is suggested, don’t know how to revise, are unwilling to revise, or haven’t been taught what revision truly is. Says teacher Shelly Smede:

“Too often, students see revision [as] a boring chore that stands between them and their word processor. They want to get to the colored fonts, the fancy graphics, and the rainbow-tinted printer paper. Teachers, too, often gloss over revision. “Your final copies are due tomorrow. Don’t forget to revise,” they call as students race out the classroom door.” (117)

Nancy Sommers says that students’ conceptions of revision are very narrow (Perl, “Writing Process” xiv). Most student writers are unable to “review their work . . . with different eyes, and to start over,” writes Sommers. Most are unable to “recognize and resolve the dissonance they sense in their writing . . . the incongruities between intention and execution [that] requires these writers to make revisions on all levels” (79, 82). I believe this apparent inability or unwillingness to revise is, in large part, the result of working on the computer; more specifically, the result of composing on the word processor and reading from the computer screen rather than writing by hand and working on paper before heading to the word processor to recopy. But fortunately for composition instructors trying to teach students how to recognize and resolve the dissonance in their writing, handwriting continues to offer itself as a highly effective low-cost, low-tech remedy for both problems. Before we look at how writing by hand circumvents these problems and engenders revision, however, let’s first look at the word processor, how it has unintentionally eliminated revision from the composing process, and composing on the machine itself.

“[D]esigned initially not for writers doing original work, but for typists transcribing someone else’s prose,” the word processor has unintentionally created problems for student writers using it as a writing tool (Bridwell 382). In a well-intended attempt to create a machine that makes writing faster and easier by doing away with the seemingly tedious and time-consuming tasks of writing by hand and recopying, we’ve removed an all-important element from the composing process that was contained in these apparently troublesome tasks: revision, or the initial and most impactful form of revision — the deep thinking and contemplation that is engendered by handwriting and recopying.

This is much like what occurred in the mid-eighties when timber companies were allowed to clear-cut in the national forests after convincing the Reagan administration that they could successfully manage the renewal of the forests’ ecosystems. Within just a few years, however, “scientists realized that the variety of flora and fauna in virgin forests was so dense, so full of hidden webs of life, that if they were heavily logged, it was impossible to fully revive them” (Oppenheimer 210). And it’s similar, as well, to what is happening today with our food supply. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan documents how we, with the help of technology, have tried to “make” food by disassembling, processing, and then reconstructing its constituent parts (87–95). But food is not something that can simply be “made,” for real food is complex in a way that we don’t understand and cannot emulate. What we’ve manufactured instead is a poor imitation of food, a product that scientists say not only lacks nutritional value but is harming us as well. In other words, when we tinker with things we don’t fully understand, believing we can improve them by remaking them, we overlook their complexity and often discard seemingly unnecessary elements that contain something essential, something valuable and vital that we didn’t recognize was present: we thought we could clear-cut the forests and then manage their renewal but destroyed hidden webs of life; we thought we could break down and then reconstruct food but lost nutrition; and we thought we could make the writing process faster and easier by using the word processor to eliminate handwriting and recopying but did away with revision — an essential element that student writers now suffer greatly for being without.

Proponents of composing on the word processor, however, often talk about how the machine allows writers to capture their thoughts and ideas more quickly than when writing by hand and how it allows them to shortcut or skip the step of recopying. “I think better at a computer,” says one student writer. “I can get my thoughts down faster” (Brady). Another, in response to Michael Leddy’s “Advice to Students,” says, “[A]ll of my college papers need to be typed, so why would I write by hand only to have to retype [them] again?” (Leddy). Other advocates of composing on the word processor similarly say that the early development of high- and low-level goals such as organization and sentence structure, respectively, is not as important as when writing by hand because of the ease by which the word processor allows writers to modify text at a later time (Burke 153). Such statements and ideas imply that composing by hand is too slow. But in their effort to compose more quickly, computer writers are only setting aside now the thinking and contemplation that they’ll have to do later by pouring their undistilled initial thoughts onto the computer screen without much consideration — thoughts that quite often have little structure, organization, meaning, or real value. College composition instructor Shari Wilson wonders if “directly typing a work somehow encourage[s] a piecemeal approach,” while I believe that writers composing on the word processor, much like David Cole’s stenographic note-takers, are quite often doing little more than recording their thought processes, transcribing the voices they hear in their heads. Rather than engaging in Kratzke’s “existential literacy” — where they think about thinking while in the act of thinking — they are instead listening to themselves think and trying to write down everything they hear word for word.

Christina Haas has attempted to explain this behavior by theorizing that many writers don’t feel they can “sit and think” and plan when working on the computer (“Medium” 165). Because there is no act analogous to “just picking up a pencil then sit[ing] and think[ing]” when using the word processor, no way to “become engaged with the task” without actually typing, writers feel they have to begin typing immediately, thus writing before they are ready (164–65). No matter what the reason, composing in this way — transcribing one’s incomplete and disordered thoughts at speed with the intention of going back and trying to continue the process at a later time — is an unnatural interruption of the normal composing process. Douglas Rushkoff, in Digital Nation, asks if we might be “tinkering with something more essential than we realize . . . by using all this stuff [technology].” I believe that by interrupting the composing process, by never allowing it to take its natural course (the deep thinking and contemplation that handwriting engenders), computer writers are making revision nearly impossible by tinkering with the way the mind naturally functions.

What is it, then, that makes handwriting so different from typing? What is happening cognitively when handwriters pause for a moment with pen or pencil in hand, cocking their heads and gazing into apparent nothingness? Haas thinks handwriters are planning — planning “up front to save themselves time recopying later” (“Medium” 165). James Britton believes that handwriters are in the act of explaining the matter to themselves in order to write intelligently (Lindemann 25). And I.A. Richards would surely say that no one really knows what is happening — that language, the “supreme organ of the mind’s self-ordering growth,” is simply doing its all-encompassing work without much conscious effort on our part (qtd. in Berthoff 109). While all are correct to differing degrees, I believe that when we write by hand we are ushered into a deeper state of contemplation — one quite different from our usual way of thinking. Stated another way, I believe we are revising, but revising at an extremely high level while in the act of composing. In trying to determine what we want to say and how best to say it, I believe our minds enter into a fantastic problem-solving mode — an incredibly complex state (or advanced mode of composing) in which we process an infinite number of thoughts and possibilities all at once; we’re creating, comparing, and contrasting ideas, restructuring, reordering, and reconstituting language as we also pay attention to what we’ve already written and what we intend to write. We are computing without a computer.

Rudolf Arnheim, who believes that perception is the mind in action, says that our minds are executing the operations of “active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, as well as combining, separating, [and] putting in context” (qtd. in Berthoff 109). Sondra Perl, in “Understanding Composing,” calls this engagement of the mind the processes of retrospective structuring — the assessment of how well our words “adequately capture our intended meaning” — and projective structuring — the “craft[ing of] what one intends to say so that it is intelligible to others” (103–104). But no matter how we choose to think of this intellectual undertaking, we are in fact executing an extremely complex form of revision in mere seconds or minutes with our own faculties and without much conscious effort. In a reciprocal relationship with the writing hand, the mind is actively engaged in identifying problems and supplying solutions; we pause to think, juggle possibilities, look forward and backward, then sift and sort through that which works and that which works best, keeping that which most satisfactorily expresses what we want to say (or think we want to say at that moment). And while what we’ve written is unlikely to go untouched, being subject to further revision or the revision that emanates from recopying, it has nonetheless been subjected to the revision that occurs cognitively when composing by hand. In contrast to that which was typed directly into the word processor at speed, our handwritten prose is not a collection of stray ideas or random thoughts committed to paper in haste; it has instead been carefully considered and deliberately rendered. Composition instructor Heather Sellers says it this way:

“Since my hand is slower on the page than both hands are on the keyboard, my brain has time to try out alternative versions of a line before putting down the one my inner ear likes best and settles on. . . . I can try out and discard weaker possibilities before they even make it to the page. Also, the extra step of typing up the handwritten work builds in an additional opportunity to let the words cool for a while and revise.” (qtd. in Castro)

Composing on the word processor is not the shortcut many think it is. Instead, it only serves to cut short the opportunities student writers have to revise, those necessary opportunities during which “much of the real thinking in writing occurs, when writers ‘discover’ and try out new ideas” (Haas, “Medium” 166). Writing by hand, conversely, offers writers numerous chances to revise by restoring revision to the composing process. And yet, in a counterintuitive exchange, students who write by hand tend to revise less over time and produce high-quality end products more quickly than do students who compose on the word processor. Said another way, writing by hand often speeds up the composing process by aiding students in producing better written products the first time out. “When I write by hand, I have to revise less,” says Sellers. “It will be faster if you do it by hand. Remember your mother saying how you should ‘do it right the first time’? You get better results and have to revise less. It is true” (qtd. in Castro).

This talk of slow hands and quick, computer-like minds carrying out revision and making the writing process “faster” by slowing it down brings to mind Kratzke’s comment about getting students to “slow down and double back, if only for a moment” (10). The real goal, I believe, is not just to get student writers to slow down, but to make them understand that what they view as “slow” is an immutable part of the writing process, the norm. Handwriting, then, when seen in this sobering light, isn’t slow and should not be considered as such; instead, it’s the fail-safe that prevents us from trying to write too fast. “[W]riting by hand keeps the process slowed down,” says Janet Emig, which “allows for surprise, time for the unexpected to intrude and even take over” (112). And writer Paul Theroux adds: “It’s fatal to get ahead of yourself. Typing, you can take a wrong turning” (qtd. in Emig 112). In response to the notion that handwriting is slow, Florey says: “Just as there is a ‘slow food’ movement to counteract fast food and fast life, perhaps we should begin a slow writing movement to regain the appreciation of writing . . . as an important meditative [activity]” (129). That writing has come to be thought of as something other than a meditative activity (or an exercise in deep thinking and serious contemplation) no doubt contributes to the problems students experience when writing and, especially, revising; the idea that faster is better and even possible where writing is concerned is surely as equally problematic. Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University says:

“In music, in poetry, and in life, the rest, the pause, the slow movements are essential to comprehending the whole. . . . The assumption that ‘more’ and ‘faster’ are necessarily better requires vigorous questioning, especially since this assumption already increasingly influences everything in American society, including how we eat and how we learn, with doubtful benefits.” (213–14)

Echoing Wolf, MIT’s Sherry Turkle says, “There are things — important things — that require being still and thinking about just that one thing,” while English professor Rosanne Potter states, “Real intellectual work takes time and . . . getting one’s hands dirty” (Digital; 183). Writing by hand, and the revision that it engenders, is indeed real hands-on, intellectual work that takes time. But it’s time and effort well spent, as student writers will come to realize. For even though “gratification isn’t immediate but slow and accumulative” when writing by hand, there are few things more gratifying when writing than digging in, getting one’s hands dirty, and solving the complex puzzle that is revision (Florey 156).

The other seemingly troublesome task eliminated by the word processor, the other lost component of revision intimately connected to writing by hand and mentioned throughout this article, is recopying — either by hand or on the keyboard. As noted before, the rereading that is essential to recopying prompts the reevaluation of our work. Recopying puts us back inside our writing, where we find ourselves rethinking and rewriting what we’ve already written or, in a word, revising. But when students don’t have to recopy, an important revision opportunity has been lost. When students don’t write by hand, instead typing their work directly into the word processor, recopying isn’t necessary because there is nothing to recopy. And when there is nothing to recopy, many students feel they are finished writing and that printing their work is all that remains. This, I believe, accounts for the oft-cited “printed is finished” phenomenon, which in turn is related to the “clean copy is untouchable” phenomenon.

The idea held by some student writers that a printed piece of writing is a finished piece of writing is, in my mind, quite understandable. For centuries now, placing a piece of handwritten work into print has been a final or finishing step. It’s also what has made writing seem special by affirming its correctness and importance. For example, writers once submitted handwritten manuscripts to publishers who then typeset the authors’ work, thus elevating it to the lofty status of print. Graduate students used to pay skilled typists sizable sums to manually type their handwritten scholarship, thereby transforming it into theses and dissertations. And even today, when we teachers state in our syllabi that all papers must be typewritten or printed, we imply that the printed aspect of an assignment is the quality that makes it legitimate and finished. Again, the idea that “printed is finished” is not such an illogical assumption; most of us, in one way or another, still tend to assume (or would like to believe) that a printed piece of writing is a polished and therefore finished end product. The word processor, however, has unintentionally disrupted this notion by making it possible for students to produce flawlessly-printed, professional-looking documents at any stage of the writing process (Bridwell 382). Student writers are now burdened with the fact that “printed” can mean almost anything: a first, fourth, or final draft of an essay or a pile of paper from the recycle bin. Without handwritten drafts around to remind them that their writing is a work in progress, student writers have to know — and are often unfairly expected to know — that which they don’t yet know: how to recognize and resolve the dissonance in their writing or, rather, revise. Is it any wonder, then, that student writers don’t revise and are “confused” about when their writing is finished and when it isn’t? Is it really surprising that for “many student writers, writing an essay is a matter of composing at the keyboard, hitting Control-P, and being done?” (Leddy).

Handwriting, fortunately enough, and the recopying that goes along with it, can serve to remind students that a “draft is a draft, not a finished piece of writing,” and that an “initial draft is usually little more than a starting point” (Leddy). While many student writers see printed documents as finished, many similarly see handwritten work as unfinished or a “step in the process” (Wilson). As a result, students are more apt to stick with a piece of handwritten work longer and more likely to revise that piece of work simply because it’s viewed as incomplete; when writing by hand, student writers seem quite willing to revise and are more than capable of revision. This is not the usual case, however, when students work from printed copies, which seem to signal “finished” at every turn by giving their words a “premature air of completeness” (Chandler). Wilson calls this the “power of print,” that inexplicable quality that makes “students often view a typed paper as an end product.” Writing by hand and recopying can negate the power of print, however, by standing between students and their word processors and eliminating printed documents from the initial or early stages of the writing process. “Without the sleek look of word-processed text,” says English teacher Leddy, “there’s no possibility of mistaking a first effort for a finished piece of writing.” Just as writing by hand prevents us from trying to write too fast, so too does it keep us from printing finished-looking drafts too soon.

Students will, however, eventually have to print copies of their writing and know how to work from these copies, because working by hand from printed copy is simply another step in the revision process (and a way to circumvent the writing-related reading problems that are imposed by the computer screen, as we will discuss in the following section). Handwritten work reads differently when typed and printed, often revealing further weaknesses in one’s writing. And when weakness or dissonance is revealed — no matter if subtle or blatantly obvious — writers are presented with additional opportunities to revise. Handwriting’s role here is to again show students something about writing and revision — namely, that writing is not an isomorphic, one-draft process and that a printed draft is no more finished than a handwritten draft. Students will hopefully carry these lessons learned with them whenever they work from printed copies, where they will also be able to resolve the dissonance found in their writing. But if student writers, for whatever reason or reasons, simply cannot move beyond the notion that a printed document is a finished document and do nothing more with the word processor than use it to type and print their handwritten work, their writing will still be the better for having seen at least two levels of revision: the revision that occurs cognitively when composing by hand and the revision that emanates from recopying.

Even when student writers seem to have moved past the idea that “printed is finished,” revising from printed copy can still be difficult, however. One of the reasons for this, I believe, is the way in which student writers often become attached to their writing and the look of their printed documents. “To revise and edit wisely,” says Lynn Bloom, “writers must detach themselves from their initial drafts. For revision often involves drastic surgery, the excision of an organic portion once thought to be vital and now deemed expendable. . .” (55). Florida A&M’s Gerald Grow says, “Writers easily become attached to what they have written, even when it serves the purpose badly. [F]or some writers . . . computers make this attachment harder to break” (218). The reluctance of students to dispense with their perfectly-printed, professional-looking words stands in contrast to the way in which students seem less attached to their words when writing by hand. Says Grow: “When [students] see their words on nice-looking pages, they begin to feel finished long before they have reason to. When I think this is happening, I deliberately mess up their printouts with markings — to shock them into distrusting the finished appearance of their working drafts” (219). The goal here, as Bloom states, is to detach students from their drafts. I remember quite well how some of my classmates took notice of the red lines, cross-outs, and handwritten corrections that covered my drafts. “Who did that?” a couple of them asked, genuinely shocked that someone actually had the audacity to mar my aesthetically-pleasing documents. When I confessed to being that someone, to editing and revising my own essays, they offered only a shrug and a raised eyebrow. “Why on earth would he do that? You won’t catch me defacing my nice-looking papers,” they were clearly thinking. While this, of course, is not the feeling of every student writer, it nonetheless illustrates the reverence paid to the printed document and the reluctance of students to throw away words committed to paper, especially words in printed form. But my classmates’ reaction to my red lines and revisions also demonstrates that writing on printed copies can break writers’ attachments to their words and the look of their printed documents by upsetting the “clean is untouchable” notion. Just as writing by hand negates the power of print, so too can it neutralize the “power of clean copy” — that other strangely influential quality that keeps students from writing on their printed drafts or, rather, revising. When Grow deliberately “messes up” his students’ printed drafts with handwritten notes and markings, then, he’s not only trying to impress upon them that printed documents are not finished, but also that clean copies are not untouchable and exempt from revision.

Looking past a document’s clean appearance is just as important as looking beyond the fact that it’s printed, because revising clean, printed copies is inevitable — and the best way to edit and revise clean, printed copies is by hand. College writing instructor Jan Swafford, who lectures his students about revising on paper, says:

“They [my students] were unused to dealing with paper until the final draft, and they’d been taught never to make hand corrections on the printout. They edited on-screen and handed in the hard copy without a glance. Handwriting is okay! I proclaimed. I love to see hand corrections! . . . Your best editing is on paper. Try it and see if I’m right. You’ll get a better grade. . . . The final polish, the nuances, the pithy phrases, the tightening of clarity and logic — those mostly come from revising on paper.”

“If anything,” writes Smede, “I’ve learned that revision is the most critical part of the writing process. That’s why I’ve designed my curriculum to include what I’ve tagged ‘working revision days’” (117). Smede requires her students to submit rough drafts with revisions, along with their final copies, and reminds them that the best revisions are those that are messy and “really ugly” (118). “Students cut out words, drew arrows to reorder paragraphs, and added detail in the margins,” says Smede. “Best of all, they were having fun doing it. . .” (118–19). “One of the great pleasures of writing is revision,” says Hilma Wolitzer, “the second and third and fourth chance you hardly ever get in any other area of your life” (qtd. in Smede 119).

Once student writers see writing by hand and recopying as superior forms of revision rather than unnecessary extra steps, once they come to understand that writing by hand can actually speed up the writing process by slowing it down, once they get past the notions that printed documents are finished and clean copies are untouchable, and once they are able to dispense with their words when necessary and write on their own printed copies, it’s likely that they are well on their way to truly understanding revision, to knowing how to recognize and resolve the dissonance in their writing. And if students receive gratification and pleasure while doing so, or perhaps even have fun, then so much the better. “[M]astery of anything is, if nothing else, fun,” says Kratzke, “real fun starting with awareness and control” (19).

Revision and Reading from the Computer Screen

While composing on the word processor (rather than writing by hand and then recopying) is one explanation for the apparent inability of students to revise, reading and working from the computer screen is another reason students are often unable to see their work with new eyes and revise effectively. But in the same way that writing by hand and recopying can remedy the problems caused by composing on the word processor, in the same way that handwriting can engender revision by operating as the fail-safe that keeps student writers from trying to write too fast and printing drafts too soon, writing by hand or using pen and paper can also circumvent the writing-related reading problems caused by the computer screen; that is to say, the way in which the computer screen prevents writers from truly “seeing” and thus reading and rereading their written work.

Interestingly, researchers have long known that reading from the computer screen is problematic in a variety of ways. This is important, of course, because of the way in which reading and writing are inextricably connected and how reading is vital to the writing process. Research as early as 1978 found that “taking tests on computers [was] slower than taking the same tests on paper” due to “slower online reading time,” while several mid-1980s studies noted that students read more slowly from a computer screen than from paper and that reading performance scores were significantly higher with paper than with computer (Haas, “Seeing” 18). These studies also concluded that reading from a computer screen was less accurate; students reported that they could “read faster and understand printed material better when working with hard copy” and were more accurate proofreading on paper than on a computer screen (18).

In her important and still-relevant “Seeing It on the Screen Isn’t Really Seeing It” from 1989, Christina Haas looked closely at the problems student writers experience when reading from the computer screen. Writers in Haas’ study reported difficulties reading their texts online, detecting errors on the screen, looking at large sections of their writing online, moving quickly to specific places in their computer texts, and “getting a sense” of their online texts (17). Most of the writers Haas interviewed wrote by hand on printed copy in order to overcome these on-screen reading problems. “These writers were able to combine their knowledge of their own reading and writing processes with their knowledge of the computer and draw upon the strengths of both pen-and-paper and the machine,” says Haas (27). These student writers “seemed to know when and how to use paper to supplement their computer writing” (27). Like researchers before her, Haas found that the “skill and speed with which writers detect the need for changes may be decreased when using a computer screen” and that many computer writers did not “trust” their ability to edit on-screen; these writers instead used printed copy to read and revise (21, 20). In “Word Processing and the Keyboard,” Dunn and Reay also found that writers were able to “get a feel for the content of writing as a whole more easily by manipulating pieces of paper than by scrolling the screen” and that “some persons appear to find error spotting easier on paper than on the screen. . .” (243). Chandler likewise says that for some writers “spreading out their sheets of writing in front of them seems to help them get a better sense of the ‘shape’ of their text, and of their ideas as manipulable [sic] [and] sculptable [sic] physical objects.” “Given these conclusive findings,” says Haas, “writers who proofread their texts on hard copy printouts are apparently doing the right thing” (21). Swafford echoes Haas in a 2010 Slate article when he points out that we perceive words on-screen differently than we do in print.

“[A]fter computers came in, I began to see peculiar stuff on papers that I hadn’t seen before: obvious[ly] missing commas and apostrophes, when I was sure most of those students knew better. It dawned on me that they were doing all their work on-screen, where it’s hard to see punctuation. I began to lecture them about proofing on paper, although, at first, I didn’t make much headway. . . . Then I noticed glitches in student writing that also resulted from editing on-screen: glaring word and phrase redundancies, forgetting to delete revised phrases, strangely awkward passages. I [then] commenced an ongoing sermon: You see differently and in some ways better on paper than on computer. Your best editing is on paper.”

In her studies with John R. Hayes, Haas found that because spatial location is not constant on a computer screen, the word processor’s lack of spatial sense of text creates problems for students performing writing-related reading tasks (“Seeing” 26). Reading-to-reorganize was found to be significantly slower on computer screens than on paper, and students were “less accurate in recalling spatial location of items when they read from a screen” than when they read from printed copy (18). Says Haas:

“Writers often ‘get lost’ in computer texts, which provide many fewer cues for spatial recall than do paper texts. . . . Recent work on how people learn from texts has pointed to the importance of ‘spatial learning strategies’ in understanding and remembering texts. . . . Certainly the fact that scrolling text does not have a constant physical configuration contributes to computer writers’ problems representing their texts to themselves and suggests that physical and spatial aspects of the text may provide cues to writers, helping them represent structure, meaning, and intent.” (21, 26)

One would like to think that these on-screen reading problems have been largely remedied by today’s advances in technology. But even with the widespread use of high-definition flat-screen monitors, reading text from a computer screen remains problematic for a great many. In listening to and soliciting the reading, writing, and computer experiences of my graduate classmates between 2008 and 2010, I was often struck by how so many admitted to suffering difficulties when reading from the computer screen, especially when attempting to negotiate lengthy texts. Patrick, a medical student and classmate in a 2009 grant-writing course, repeatedly emphasized his inability to read efficiently and effectively from a computer screen. As a result, he printed all his assigned texts — Word and PDF documents — on paper in order to read and do research. And while he chose to begin his writing on the computer, he read from and revised his written work by hand on printed copy. My own experience is somewhat similar. I too struggle when reading from the computer because of the small screen (the inability to see entire pages at full-size) and the lack of spatial referents; and I also print Word and PDF documents in order to read, highlight, and make marginal notes. But because I compose my initial drafts by hand, and then read from and revise by hand on printed copies after recopying on the word processor, I’m able to circumvent the writing-related reading problems caused by the computer screen.

Beyond these problems, though, I simply find it impossible to concentrate for any length of time when reading from the computer screen; my focus drifts, my mind wanders, and I often find myself fighting and then giving in to the urge to escape my workstation. Of course, staring at a computer screen taxes our minds and bodies, because rather than gazing upon an object that absorbs and reflects light (paper), we’re looking into a light source (the screen) that is aimed directly at us. “It is not quite accurate to say that when we [look at a computer screen] we are looking at light,” says Mander, “it is more accurate to say that light is projected into us. We are receiving light through our eyes into our bodies, far enough in to affect our endocrine system. . .” (Arguments 171). But maybe something larger is at work here, a phenomenon not considered or perhaps overlooked by Haas: the fact that the “computer screen is essentially a TV” (Swafford). “The video image, in contrast to film, is constantly being redrawn as we watch it,” says Swafford. “[O]ur eye and brain have to create the illusion of a complete picture; [this] process sucks us in, starting at the level of our synapses.” Mander puts it this way:

“When you are watching television [or staring at a computer screen] and believe you are looking at pictures, you are actually looking at the phosphorescent glow of three hundred thousand tiny dots [or pixels]. There is no picture there.

“These dots seem to be lit constantly, but in fact they are not. All the dots go off thirty times per second, creating what is called the flicker effect of television, which is similar to strobe or ordinary fluorescent light.

“For may years conventional wisdom held that since this flickering happens at a rate beyond the so-called flicker-fusion rate of the human eye, we do not consciously note it, and we presumably are not affected by it. However, recent discoveries about the biological effects of very minor stimuli . . . have shown that whether we consciously note the flicker or not, our bodies react to it.” (Arguments 192)

Technology writer Nicholas Carr astutely attributes his uncharacteristic disinterest in reading to the way the Internet is “chipping away at [our] capacity for concentration and contemplation” by delivering information in a “swiftly moving stream of particles.” Yet Swafford is as equally insightful when suggesting that the “mesmerizing” or flickering effects of the computer’s video image, like those of television’s, are contributing significantly to the problems writers suffer when reading from the computer screen. Because our minds are burdened with constructing images from incomplete information while simultaneously attempting to extract meaning from those images, we are not reading efficiently or effectively. Stated another way, because these “images move more quickly than a viewer can react, one has to chase after them with the mind,” writes Mander, paraphrasing Dr. Freda Morris, a former professor of medical psychology at UCLA. “This leaves no way of breaking the contact and therefore no way to comment upon the information as it passes in. It stops the critical mind” (Arguments 197). Teacher Debbie Wallizer’s experience with her young students is perhaps a good example of how reading from the computer screen can dull the critical mind (or, at least, the way in which it is less preferable than reading from paper). “When [the computer system] first came, they loved it,” says Wallizer. “Now it’s boring to them. If you gave them a choice, they’d rather read books.” (qtd. in Oppenheimer 118). Wallizer says that when her students are exposed to books, their reaction is the opposite of that when using computers: after initially expressing a dislike for reading books, they quickly become interested (119).

“Reading is crucial to the writing process,” says Haas, and “successful writing requires self-assessment, or reading to evaluate” (“Seeing” 19, 23). In “Understanding Composing,” Perl says that while writing is recursive, the elements that recur seem to vary from writer to writer:

“The most visible recurring feature or backward movement involves rereading little bits of discourse. Few writers I have seen write for long periods of time without returning briefly to what is already down on the page.

“For some . . . rereading occurs after every few phrases; for others, it occurs after every sentence; more frequently, it occurs after a ‘chunk’ of information has been written. Thus, the unit that is reread is not necessarily a syntactic one, but rather a semantic one as defined by the writer.” (100)

A striking example of the importance of this rereading or reading to evaluate is Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of how his functional blindness forced him to give up writing. In an interview published in the New York Review of Books in 1975, Sartre said:

“I cannot see what I write. And reading is absolutely out of the question. . . . I can no longer correct my work even once, because I cannot read what I have written. Thus, what I write or what I say necessarily remains in the first version . . . . One rereads what one rewrites. But one can read slowly or quickly: in other words, you do not know how long you will have to take deliberating over a sentence. It’s possible that what is not right in the sentence will not be clear to you at the first reading. Perhaps there is something inherently wrong with it, perhaps there is a poor connection between it and the preceding sentence or the following sentence or the paragraph as a whole or the chapter, etc.

“All this assures that you approach your text somewhat as if it were a magical puzzle, that you change words here and there one by one, and go back over these changes and then modify something farther along.” (qtd. in Emig 113, 115)

Without the ability to read, Sartre could not move backward and forward through his text at his own leisure, scanning and rescanning his work, constructing and reconstructing meaning, in order to make the instantaneous changes writers must necessarily make during the act of composing. Stated another way, when writers are prevented from reading their work swiftly, accurately, and comfortably, for whatever reason, they are essentially writing blindly.

With all its limitations, the computer screen has handicapped us in just this way, preventing us from “seeing” or reading our work by negating our “subtle awareness of the visual details of print” and thus forcing us, in many ways, to write blindly or simply go through the motions of writing (Wolfe 90). It’s easy to understand, then, how writing by hand and revising from printed copies effectively remedies the writing-related reading problems imposed by the computer screen and why one of Haas’ student writers says, “I use hard copy because seeing it on the screen isn’t really seeing it” (“Seeing” 17). “Problems in reading online . . . may pose significant difficulties for students learning to write with word processors,” concludes Haas. “Far from being the idiosyncratic musings of computer skeptics, the reports of computer writers suggest that there are important limitations to using computers for writing and that reliance on pen and paper can help circumvent those limitations” (27).

Handwriting and the Composition Classroom

I’m not advocating that we restore handwriting to the composition curriculum or give it renewed attention where it has lost favor within the curriculum because it’s a virtuous or romantic method of transcription. Neither am I suggesting that we have students write by hand simply because that’s the way it’s always been done. I’m advocating that we once again begin encouraging students to write by hand because it is a superior revision tool — one that engenders revision and solves many of our revision-related problems. When Haas casually noted two decades ago that many handwriters feel free to pick up a pencil and then just sit and think, to engage themselves with the task of writing by holding the pencil without producing text right away, she hit upon the special element or superior quality of writing by hand that’s been largely ignored ever since: the deep thinking and contemplation it engenders (“Medium” 164). Writing by hand is revision: while in the act of composing we generate, examine, narrow, and structure our thoughts and ideas before we write, before we ever commit words to the page.

I’m also suggesting that we encourage students to write their initial drafts by hand because it’s often easier and more efficient than composing on the computer. “Many writers . . . [make] extensive use of graphical markings such as arrows, stars, or brackets,” says Haas, “these markings are quick and easy to make on paper but difficult to make online” (“Seeing” 21). Similarly, erasing or striking out something on paper and then rewriting is also quick and easy — considerably faster than moving a cursor, highlighting a word or phrase, double clicking, and then retyping — and one’s discarded text is still present should it be needed again, for whatever reason. One can, of course, highlight or strikeout text when working on the word processor; but many find “such maneuvers to be more cumbersome and time-consuming” than working by hand (Ferris 363). Chandler says:

“[W]riting done with a word processor obscures its own evolution. ‘Crossing out’ on a word processor is usually accomplished by deleting words, leaving no trace. . . . In more senses than one something may be lost with the word processor [when] compared with handwriting. . . . Apologists who point to the existence of facilities and techniques which cater for preserving changes with the word processor fail to recognize the deliberateness [emphasis added] such strategies require in contrast to a rapid slash of the pen — which can preserve every change (even with subtle and unpremeditated degrees of unwantedness). The handwritten text maps paths not taken in a way that enables them to be re-explored if necessary.”

But perhaps Leddy says it best:

“Writing by hand simplifies the work of organizing ideas into an essay. Compare the tedium of creating an outline in Microsoft Word with the ease of arranging and rearranging on paper, where ideas can be reordered or added or removed with simple arrows and strikethroughs. With index cards, reordering is even easier. . . . Writing by hand [also] helps to minimize the scattering of attention that seems almost inevitable at a computer. . . . Even without an online connection, a word-processing program itself offers numerous distractions from writing. Writing by hand keeps the emphasis where it needs to be — on getting the words right, not on fonts, margins, or program settings. Writing is not word processing.”

I’m not intimating, nor are Haas, Chandler, and Leddy, that we abandon word processors; they do, without question, serve a real purpose and meet a real need. But the word processor should be subordinate to handwriting, since the former is largely a consequence of the latter: the word processor is a writing aid whose value is wholly determined by our ability to use language. In other words, better writers are better word processors. Writing by hand and the revision it engenders allows student writers to increase their facility with the word processor by showing them how the machine complements handwriting rather than replacing it.

We have to be careful, however, when we emphasize and come to rely upon a technology such as word processing which eliminates tasks such as writing by hand and recopying in an attempt to make the writing process faster and easier. Because, as we have seen, when we discard such apparently burdensome tasks we often find that we’ve done away with something valuable that we didn’t understand, something complex and vital that we now suffer for being without. For in the same way that a baker making an angel food cake can skip the seemingly unnecessary and time-consuming task of sifting his or her flour and still produce the semblance of a cake, so too can student writers compose on the word processor, skipping the seemingly unnecessary and troublesome tasks of writing by hand and recopying, and still produce something that resembles writing. While both can pass for what they were intended to be, the absence of the discarded tasks keep both from being what they truly could or should be. In short, writing by hand and recopying are part of the recipe for good writing, something I believe we should relate to our composition students as they learn to write and use word processors.

A way to effectively communicate these ideas about handwriting — and also teach without distraction while showing regard for the limited and valuable class time of students — is to hold core composition classes in traditional classrooms. “Class sessions conducted entirely in a computer lab,” says Dana Ferris and John Hedgcock, “tend to function as writers’ workshops. That is, students see class sessions as a time to write rather than to receive explicit instruction in writing” (357). Oppenheimer, when writing about his experience watching such classes, says he repeatedly felt as though he was “observing some modern version of the Heisenberg effect: The mere existence of computers in the classroom [seemed] to alter the atmosphere. And more often than not, it [encouraged] everybody in the room to go off task” (161). This is a phenomenon I experienced personally (and am thus very sensitive to) when one of my graduate classes was moved into a smart classroom at mid-semester in early 2009: scheduled class sessions quickly and routinely broke down into 75 minutes of socializing, and I and several of my classmates grew resentful that the class time we paid so handsomely for was turned into lab time without our consent. Many composition teachers report similar feelings of resentment when they are assigned to computer classrooms and end up feeling like software instructors instead of English composition teachers, while many students often feel that “their time is being used (or ‘wasted’) because they are not doing anything in class” (Wilson; Ferris 358). When James Paul Gee says that “humans don’t learn well when they are just left to their own devices to operate within complex contexts about which they know very little,” he accurately describes what is sometimes the unintended result of placing student writers in smart classrooms (qtd. in Kratzke 19). The composition classroom is not typing class, word processing 101, or open computer lab. Class time is time reserved for teachers and students — one hour and fifteen minutes twice a week during which composition instructors and student writers should be assured of opportunities to deliver and receive, respectively, explicit instruction in writing.

When teachers are delivering writing instruction and disseminating ideas about handwriting it’s also important, I believe, that they work to reduce the distance that can often develop between instructors and students. One of the main principles of California’s Bay Area Writing Project, for example, is that “all teachers should write in order to understand the writing process first-hand” (Hairston 122). While I agree completely, I similarly believe that all composition teachers should write and share their writing with their students in the composition classroom (during daily freewriting exercises, for instance) in order to show students that the ongoing and impassioned discussion about writing by hand is not just idle talk, and that their instructor actually practices what he or she routinely advocates. As a composition teacher who does write and has come to understand the writing and composing process by writing (writing my drafts by hand before heading to the word processor), I’ve purposely kept my handwritten and printed drafts for nearly everything I’ve written, including school essays and term papers. I intend to share these drafts with students (as one of my past instructors so effectively did) to show them where a finished piece of writing comes from: how it begins, evolves, and takes shape; how much time and effort are involved in bringing a piece of writing from the idea and notes stage to a true state of completeness. Seeing ugly, messy, barely-readable handwritten initial drafts on notebook paper next to a clean, nicely-printed final draft often has a remarkable impact on student writers. Knowing that writing requires effort and takes time for most (if not all) writers, knowing that the “right words and sentences . . . do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time,” often lessens the sometimes daunting appearance of the writing task, while gaining a glimpse of the unknown, of what lies ahead, often moves or frees students to begin writing (Lamott). Moreover, it shows students that writing by hand is not a meaningless extra step that slows them down; instead, it is a superior method of composing that engenders revision while in the act of composing — one that often speeds up the writing process by enabling them to produce better written products the first time out, one that is a precursor to yet perfectly compatible with the word processor.

Composition instructors who are handwriters, who are fortunate enough to work in traditional classroom environments, who are able to focus on delivering writing instruction, and who are willing to write with their students often display a profound enthusiasm for handwriting — their own and that of their students. When writing by hand, Sellers says that she has a “chance to really, really write. Not vent. Not pour out words. [W]hen the hand takes over and the body and brain are working together — this is always my best work” (qtd. in Castro). And when her students write by hand, she sees a difference in their work as well: “I do. It’s amazing. They see it too. I can tell when they bring their final manuscripts (typed up) to workshop who is writing by hand and who isn’t. It’s like looking at scarves made by machine and scarves knit by hand by a dear friend. Two different beasts” (qtd. in Castro). The handwritten essays have an “ineffable spark,” “that thing,” says Sellers, while the others feel “pat, familiar, kind of ‘phoned in’” (qtd. in Castro).

Likewise, student writers seem to thrive when they work in traditional learning environments and are encouraged to write by hand by supportive, enthusiastic instructors. In a 2006 article for Inside Higher Ed, Wilson states that nearly half her students scored significantly better on in-class essays written by hand than on word-processed papers written outside of class. “How can I make sense of this? . . . Was I somehow more relaxed when grading handwritten essays?” Wilson wondered. “Possibly. But in my mind . . . there must have been something more [at work here] to explain jumps of more than a full grade level.” Wilson then typed a student’s handwritten midterm in order to compare it to two essays composed on the word processor:

“The handwritten midterm was so much smoother — I was shocked. Transitions abounded. Other than a few run-ons, sentence structure was fluid. One idea followed another. Claims were supported. The writer seemed to have hit a stride that held out for the required three pages. The computer-generated essays were passable. The ideas were sound, but the writing seemed awkward in every sense.”

Thus dismissing the notion that she may have been more lenient when grading handwritten work, Wilson believes the following explanations account for the higher scores awarded to handwritten essays: First, writing by hand seems to discourage the “overwrought, constipated” writing that some students produce when composing on the computer; second, handwriting encourages students to focus on the writing process rather than the end product of their writing; and third, handwriting puts writers in closer contact with their work, which tends to bring forth excellence from many students. Leddy, who encourages his student writers to plan and draft their written assignments by hand, says, “Then sit down and type. Thinking and writing away from the computer might make your work better, as seems to be the case for so many students.” And Sellers says: “I have not yet had a student who writes by hand say, ‘Yeah, I’m really going to try the computer and see how that goes’. Once they start (or return) to hand, they never, ever go back” (qtd. in Castro).

All of this is important, I believe, because of the tremendous influence writing teachers have on student writers. When we assume the roles of “composition instructors” we need to be keenly aware that we are often seen as writing experts, whether we like it or not. Students are watching us closely — judging us, sizing us up, paying attention to whether we do what we say or simply bark out instructions. Student writers, in other words, are looking for signs of integrity; they want their writing instructors to embrace and practice what they preach. Students are not demanding perfection, but they do expect us to be good at what we talk about every day, to be good writers. We therefore need to make a concerned effort to do as many things correctly as possible. Of course, not all student writers are inspired, interested writers — those who “invest themselves in writing, who carefully consider the structure of their arguments, who care about crafting a sentence” (Lipstein 79). But when we are genuinely passionate about writing by hand and the revision it engenders, when we truly believe that writing and writing well are important and valuable academic and social pursuits, we have a real opportunity to change the way students feel about writing — an opportunity to teach students to be interested in writing, to even love writing (79). As overly-optimistic as this might sound, it’s really not such an extreme statement; after all, a great many students report that “their interest for writing is often influenced by their teachers and classroom practice” (79). The truth is that our enthusiasm for writing has the power to inspire and influence students, transforming them into interested, enthusiastic writers who choose to write and revise their drafts by hand because they understand handwriting’s value and the role it plays in the writing and composing process.

This discussion of restoring handwriting to the composition curriculum is not about forcing the past upon the present, the old upon the new; it is, rather, only about that which works and that which works best. Perhaps giving handwriting the renewed attention it rightfully deserves within the curriculum will play a part in fostering a “back to basics” movement in the teaching of writing — a reformation of sorts wherein the best parts of earlier methods for teaching writing are taught alongside the best parts of present-day methods, thus affording student writers a real “chance to become confident, creative masters of the modern tools of their day. . .” (Oppenheimer xx). Everything we need to begin this restoration and reformation is now in place before us: eager, literate students; enthusiastic, willing teachers; modern, comfortable classrooms; and all the pens, pencils, and paper we can get our hands on. We don’t have to acquire or discard anything. We only need to begin talking about and teaching the value of handwriting; we only need to begin encouraging students to write and revise their drafts by hand, allowing them to see for themselves how doing so can improve their writing.

Writing by hand — that simple, non-technical apparatus that helps us acquire our intellectual powers and then apply and use those powers — stands ready to fill technology’s holes and bridge its gaps and provide student writers with a superior revision tool. All we have to do is begin using it.

Writing by Hand: A Powerful Revision Tool (A Master’s Thesis). Copyright 2011 Ron Baxendale II, University of Colorado at Denver.